Politics

Republican Senator: ‘The Most Dangerous Thing To Happen In The 2016 Presidential Election Was … Normalization Of Socialism’

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Shortly before Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win, Republican Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner predicted the rise of socialism in the Democratic party and warned of its downfalls in a June 8 speech.

“The most dangerous thing to happen in America in the 2016 Presidential election was Bernie Sanders[‘s] normalization of socialism. Bernie normalized socialism for a broad set of the electorate, mainly … a generation of young voters who have never lived through an era where the evils of socialism played out in eastern Europe night after night after night on the evening news,” Gardner said in the speech, according to a transcript provided to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We must take this threat seriously because it burns the candle lit for freedom on both ends if we ignore it,” Gardner said in the speech.

Socialist and advocate for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Ocasio-Cortez won her Democratic congressional primary in New York’s House District 14 with 57.5 percent of the vote to incumbent and fourth-most-powerful Democrat in the House New York Rep. Joseph Crowley’s 42.5 percent, according to a Tuesday night report from the New York Times.

But Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters never mentioned the darker sides of socialism. In Socialist Venezuela, over 400 children died in 2016 from starvation and malnutrition, according to a December 2017 New York Times article. That number only encompasses nine out of the country’s 21 public hospitals.

“Before recent elections, people living in government housing projects said they were visited by representatives of their local Socialist community councils … and threatened with being cut off [from food],” the New York Times article stated.

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